Pablo Picasso (Málaga, Spain, 1881 – Mougins, France, 1973) was one of the defining artists of the twentieth century and a central figure in the formation of modern art. The son of an academic painter, he received rigorous early training in Spain before moving between Barcelona and Madrid, and eventually to Paris, where he first arrived in 1900 and settled permanently in 1904.

His early Blue and Rose Periods established his command of pathos, figure, and atmosphere, while the radical breakthrough of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907, which fractured five female figures into angular, mask-like planes, opened the way toward Cubism, developed in close dialogue with Georges Braque. Introduced to Henri Matisse by Gertrude Stein in 1906, Picasso entered a decades-long rivalry and friendship with the older artist, telling his biographer Pierre Daix late in life that "no one has ever looked at Matisse's painting more carefully than I." Through analytic and synthetic Cubism, collage, and papier collé, works that pasted newspaper, wallpaper, and rope directly onto the canvas, Picasso fundamentally altered the relationship between representation, objecthood, and pictorial space.